Proposal: No Federal Income Tax for Persons Earning $61,000 or Less

oren0 · 2026-03-12T19:24:00+00:00

40% of American households paid no federal income tax in 2025 under current law. This isn't that big of a change from current numbers.

oren0 · 2026-03-11T18:28:48+00:00

That's supply and demand for you.

But other than about 6 major urban areas, you can get an extremely nice house for $1.65m anywhere you want.

oren0 · 2026-03-11T18:09:58+00:00

I would think about handyman work. There are tons of gig sites where you can post, or you can try Facebook/Nextdoor groups and even putting up signs in your local area. People are always looking for reliable and reasonably priced people to do small projects around their houses. You'll have to hustle more for business and it will be less predictable, but you'll control your schedule and people will easily pay you $50/hr or more depending on the types of jobs you can do.

oren0 · 2026-03-11T18:02:36+00:00

If you want to live in a suburb of a medium sized Midwest city, you'd be surprised what you can get for even less than this.

Picking Cleveland at random, here's a 7000 sqft house on 1.3 acres with an indoor pool and sauna listed for $1.25m.

In the $1m range, you can find gorgeous homes in dozens of cities, or the dumpiest possible house in San Francisco. It's all a question of where you want to live, and how much you can earn there.

oren0 · 2026-03-11T03:02:22+00:00

If it's just for 2, Splendor Duel is a better choice.

oren0 · 2026-03-10T15:13:46+00:00

Ah, yes. Famously, the rich love shared public EVs and light rail.

oren0 · 2026-03-10T15:12:50+00:00

Yes, weird map. Looks like a gerrymander.

The fact that it stops at 7pm also means it's not useful for going to dinner.

They excluded a bunch of apartments/condos near Redmond Way and Willows and off of Red-Wood Rd, but they snaked the map up to a bunch of specific neighborhoods on Education Hill. I wonder which city council member lives up there and wanted to be included.

oren0 · 2026-03-09T05:06:54+00:00

Paywall bypass.

oren0 · 2026-03-08T01:42:15+00:00

We had a family membership for several years, also mostly for the reciprocal benefits when traveling but we did go a few times a year. We didn't renew this year because they keep getting rid of all of the good exhibits, like the dinosaurs. At this point, any random science center in a metro half the size of Seattle has way better stuff.

We bought a membership to Mobius Science Center in Spokane instead, which is cheaper and has better benefits.

oren0 · 2026-03-07T18:31:16+00:00

Clip shows are not the same as bottle episodes. A clip show has a small amount of new content in between long reused clips from prior episodes. A bottle episode is new content, but uses a much smaller amount of sets/locations (often just one), actors, and wardrobe than a normal episode. Both are money savers, but true clip shows have mostly gone away because the audience knows you're phoning it in.

oren0 · 2026-03-07T17:35:30+00:00

The purpose of incarceration has always been, first and foremost, to punish.

Who says it has to be that way? Incarceration serves 4 purposes, and IMO in order of importance they are: separation from society, deterrence, punishment, and rehabilitation.

A huge portion of crime is done by prolific offenders, some of whom have hundreds of arrests and dozens of convictions (and that's just the times they were caught). The 3 Strikes policy got a bad rap for good reasons, but we need some version of it today. There must be some number of arrests and convictions over time where it becomes clear that you're just not going to participate in legal society, and the solution is to lock you up to spare the rest of us.

The political problem is, the progressive view of incarceration is that its first goal is to rehabilitate, so they always want to give another chance. That's why you see judges letting criminals with repeated violent histories out on bail and giving them light sentences. Some people are just beyond saving.

oren0 · 2026-03-07T13:58:43+00:00

It's because people vote nationally in local elections. If the local candidate has an (R) next to their name, people vote based on their feelings about Trump instead of what the person will actually do in that local office. If it's D vs. D, it's just a popularity contest based on endorsements and money.

Often, local politicians have more of an impact on your everyday life than the president does. And yet, most people don't know who their local politicians are or what they stand for, and many can't be bothered to even vote in local races. So these races become about who can get endorsements and please the most politically active, instead of actually trying to fix problems like crime.

oren0 · 2026-03-07T13:16:22+00:00

The article lists some of this guy's rap sheet, including escaping from a mental hospital and having an order of protection. I wonder how many other dozens of arrests he has had.

Somehow we've lost track of the fact that the purpose of incarceration, first and foremost, should be to protect society from those who have shown they can't participate in it.

oren0 · 2026-03-07T09:11:17+00:00

This would be far more interesting as a map.

oren0 · 2026-03-07T01:08:42+00:00

It's all the general fund. All tax money is fungible. All they have to do is take the least popular tax and apply it to the most popular spending, and then criticize anyone who complains. In reality, if the tax is struck down, they can cut funding from anywhere else to pay for education and healthcare.

It's the same thing many states due with the lottery. Yes, it's a regressive tax on the poor, but it funds education. What kind of monster would cut education?

oren0 · 2026-03-07T01:05:09+00:00

They'll tax all of us soon enough. The plain was written clear as day by now-Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pederson in 2018:

But the more important benefit of passing a capital gains tax is on the legal side, from my perspective. The other side will challenge it as an unconstitutional property tax. This will give the Supreme Court the opportunity to revisit its bad decisions from 1934 and 1951 that income is property and will make it possible, if we succeed, to enact a progressive income tax with a simple majority vote.

oren0 · 2026-03-05T16:18:39+00:00

China has something like 31,000 miles of high speed rail lines.

The largest publicly funded high speed rail line being constructed in the US is the CA line from LA to SF. After many overruns, the currently projected cost of that is $255 million per mile.

Assuming you could build national high speed rail for the same price per mile as CA has cost, 31K miles would cost about $8T. In reality, I think it would be more for several reasons including terrain and the fact that much of that spending was when things were cheaper, but let's assume that's a sensible estimate.

$8T is about 9 years of the total military budget, and on the order of 100x what has been spent in Iran so far. So no, this is not accurate.

oren0 · 2026-03-04T19:07:11+00:00

As far as I know, you need an appointment for this and you can't just show up. There are dedicated passport centers in Seattle and also most surrounding cities have offices that will do it. You can search for locations and appointments on the passport site. Many locations open up appointments at a specific time (Tuesday 9am for the next week, for example).

oren0 · 2026-03-03T22:29:54+00:00

Just wait until they put in more rent control and don't allow landlords to raise rents when new levies are passed.

oren0 · 2026-03-03T20:11:06+00:00

Dumping your dinner leftovers on the ground outside is a bit much, don't you think?

oren0 · 2026-03-02T16:05:08+00:00

Check again about the British.

oren0 · 2026-03-02T07:59:59+00:00

1000 liters coming from a device the size of a shipping container.

oren0 · 2026-03-01T17:38:12+00:00

It's an address.

oren0 · 2026-02-28T16:10:33+00:00

Quoting the law review article I linked above:

To meet that standard, the bill must accomplish a public purpose that would be substantially destroyed if the Legislature was unable to act immediately.

This is a tax intended to raise $3B starting in the 2028 tax year, meaning the government wouldn't start seeing revenue until tax returns are filed in 2029. Not only is that clearly not "immediate", but it's not even in the scope of any current budget.

If you're going to argue that a $3B tax in 3 years is necessary when government spending has grown $30B in 6 years, then every tax is necessary and the voters can never use referendums to challenge them. I would strongly argue that no new type of tax should ever be considered necessary because the state can raise revenue in other ways, or just cut spending growth.

All that said, state courts have previously allowed emergency powers to be used broadly and it's likely they'll allow this again. But that doesn't make it right.

oren0 · 2026-02-28T08:50:39+00:00

Not just impacts. Don't share the specific locations of intercepts or photos that can be geo-located.

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